Denise Cai is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS or Mount Sinai), formerly the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, is a private medical school in New York City. It is the academic teaching arm of the Mount Sinai Health System, which manages eight ...

Education and early career

Cai attended the University of California, San Diego, where she received her Bachelor of Science in psychology in 2004. There, she performed an honors thesis under the mentorship of Ebbe Ebbesen entitled "Computational model of rape and assault cases." She continued her education at UCSD, pursuing her doctoral degree in Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience, working with advisors Sara Mednick, Stephan Anagnostaras, and Michael Gorman. Her graduate work focused on how sleep affects memory formation in humans and in mice. In humans, she found that

rapid eye movement (REM) sleep Rapid eye movement sleep (REM sleep or REMS) is a unique phase of sleep in mammals and birds, characterized by random rapid movement of the eyes, accompanied by low muscle tone throughout the body, and the propensity of the sleeper to dream viv ...

facilitates creative thinking, compared to quiet rest and non-REM sleep. Specifically, she found that REM sleep enhances the integration of unassociated memories and is associated with processes of abstraction and generalization that facilitate problem solving and discovery. Cai received her Ph.D. in 2010 and then moved to the University of California, Los Angeles for a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratories of

Alcino J. Silva Alcino J. Silva (born April 9, 1961) is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist who was the recipient of the 2008 Order of Prince Henry and elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013 for his contributions ...

and Peyman Golshani. She pursued this work with the support of a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Research

In 2017, Cai became an assistant professor in the department of neuroscience at the

. There, her research program centers on investigating memory formation.

Awards and honors

* Distinguished Scholar Award,

, 2020 * National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award, 2019 *One Mind Rising Star Research Award, 2019 *Klingenstein-

Simons Simons is a surname of Scandinavian origins and a variant of Sigmundsson, a patronymic surname with roots in proto-Germanic ''*segaz'' and ''*mundō'', giving a rough translation of "protection through victory". Notable people A * Alan ...

Fellowship, 2018 *

Allen Institute The Allen Institute is a non-profit, bioscience research institute located in Seattle. It was founded by billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen, Paul G. Allen in 2003. The Allen Institute conducts large-scale Basic research, basic science researc ...

Next Generation Leader, 2017

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cai, Denise Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American women neuroscientists American neuroscientists